REF animation site

HERE is the spinquad where he talks about a new plugin, "Surpasses" (layers in layout:

(See also "ref" part of above site)

"Generally speaking Surpasses allow You to have multiple layout "layers", they are kind of scene morphs. You have Your basic scene called "base" and layers (morphs) are applied over it. Layer can include any set of items and various properties like antialiasing level, ray trace flags, etc.

Let me give You an example. You are working on a scene in which You set some high quality render settings. That is fine, but You need to fine tune some part of scene. Typically You would need to hide parts that You don't need and change render settings to preview quality to see results faster. Then, You would need to set settings back to high quality for final render.

With Surpasses, You just create a separate "preview" layer, with only those parts of scene You want to see and with low quality settings in it. Whenever You switch to this layer You will be able to test right away and then simply switch back to base when You're done.

Another example could be working with rigs, You can have different set of controls as separate layers and switch between them as needed, this way You don't have to see all controls at once cluttering view.

Surpasses are interactive and integrated within LW which means the effects of switching layers are visible both in openGL and in render. It also works with plugins like FPrime.

There are many more features in progress and You can be sure I'll tell You about them when whey are working as expected. I'm pretty excited with development of Surpasses and I hope to deliver a good tool to You, however the tool is still in development phase so some things may change."